Luckily so far the only 2:30 games I’ve been really anxious to see have fallen on days where I didn’t have work the next day, and so, it’s been a lot of fun. It’s a really entertaining experience to be in a bar at 3 in the morning surrounded by equally enthused people chanting USA. It’s even more fun, I think, when the other half of the bar is English and has much more creative cheers only to get drowned out by an even louder round of U!S!A! Thankfully, the experience was a pretty fun feel rather than one of unveiled hostility or contempt. I was standing next to this Brit and he had the good humor to answer some of my rooted-in-ignorance questions (mostly about the lineups of both teams since I really don’t know anything).

I’ve started reading The Goal Post since I can’t be bothered to go out and find commentary myself, I’m relying on their “Best of AM/PM” digests to keep me somewhat informed. So far so good, I guess.

GOOO USA! (ps thx Green)

As such we’ve chatted about it a bit as I’ve played around with it. I am definitely a subvocalizer and so presumably that is limiting my reading speed in a major way. I read something like 500-700 wpm. This is about as fast as a friend of mine here in China reads English as her second language. I guess I pause less to look up words I don’t know but the notion of reading as fast in Chinese as I do in English seems impossible enough as it is. Her Chinese reading speed is probably faster than her English by a significant factor too.

When I asked if she subvocalizes, I first had to explain what I meant by that, and when I felt like I had succeeded, the answer was a clear no. I asked a few guys at work too (those adjacent to my desk, basically) and after struggling to explain to them as well, the answer was again mostly “no” (that or “I don’t understand”.

The sample size is obviously too small but I wonder if most Chinese readers do not subvocalize what is it about Chinese education or culture or ideographs or whatever that causes them not to develop the habit as I have for reading?

I’ve been going back and forth with him on emails and some of the questions he’s asked me I feel like I want to think about a little more so I’ve tried to use them as a basis for this post.

I think I’m in a fairly lucky position of having a bunch of pretty good friends who I can visit that are concentrated in a handful of cities in the US. It makes any visit to those cities into a good trip and if ever I do manage to move back to the US it’ll leave me in a position to hopefully avoid the awkward situation of starting out with absolutely no social network to speak of, as was the case when I moved to China.

There are certainly things I miss about the US while I am in China and things I miss about China while i am in the US. I think one of the big things I appreciate about being in China, and only realize that I have come to take it for granted when I go back to the US, is the cheapness and convenience of a lot of things. Food in particular comes to mind – it’s a really fantastic that I can basically go downstairs and across the street are 4 different hole-in-the-wall restaurants any one of which I can go to and get a delicious dinner for no more than a couple bucks, USD.

It’s a little weird to go back to the US and feel like I’m a visitor there now. I mean, every day in Beijing I am faced with this very obvious sense of being not like everybody here, but it’s a new thing to have that happen in the US, I guess. Sure, in somewhere like NY a great many people are not from there but at the same time it was an experience I am not used to and am unsure if I will ever get used to.

That all said, I’ve gotten pretty comfortable I guess. Daily routine things have not shifted in some dramatic way for me. Some people when they come to China lament the coffee options and eventually upon discovering where to buy better coffee then lament how it’s relatively expensive compared to other options. I imagine this’ll change as people in China drink more and more Coffee but we’ll see. I’m not a coffee drinker so this particular experience never really came up for me. My breakfast routine was always basic stuff like yogurt, or eggs, or oatmeal, all of which are no trouble at all.

I liked how friendly people seemed when I first moved here though now it feels a little superficial. People aren’t screaming “HELLO!” for much of any other reason as to point me out as a foreigner and demonstrate that they can. Maybe I’m being too harsh, I don’t know. I do like that in the US I can readily engage in a deeper conversation with most people simply because we have a shared language. My Chinese proficiency still really isn’t good enough for me to get into seriously meaty conversations. At the rate it’s improving I wonder if it ever will be unless I really drop everything and seriously resume studying for a while.

I don’t know, we’ll see. I’m still having a pretty good time, and still when people ask “how long will [I] be here?” I answer “as long as it stays fun and interesting.”

Where are the best Japanese restaurants in Beijing?

In terms of "where" geographically, my guess would be up near Anjialou, where I understand there to be a higher density of Japanese expats. Up there is a little pocket of a bunch of Japanese restaurants, of which I've only tried two, but both of which I liked a lot.

One is Sake Manzo but the other, next door, is my personal favorite. It's called Takenosuke and is so far one of only a couple places I've found to eat okonomiyaki here in Beijing.

Continuing with places elsewhere in the city: the only other place I've had okonomiyaki is Izaka-ya in Sanlitun. I found the okonomiyaki to not be as good but their other offerings quite tasty.

While Hatsune strikes me less a Japanese place and more a Californian take on Japanese, it does nonetheless end up on most lists of good Japanese options in Beijing.

There are a bunch of all-you-can-eat/drink types of places, be it for sushi (eg Tokugawa), or teppanyaki (eg Tairyo). While they can present a good value in the right circumstances I wouldn't argue for them being the best at most things.

There are a bunch of nondescript little Japanese-style curry places dotted around Beijing which vary a lot in quality but one I found particularly tasty is Tonkatsu and Curry Rice in Wudaokou. There's little highbrow about the place but damn if it isn't tasty.

Finally, Oden is an interesting place that places an uncommon (in my Japanese dining experiences, at least) emphasis on oden. Being a big fan of the stuff, I've liked my meals there, though the austere decor is perhaps not the most inviting.

Anyway… What is it like to be a hapa in an Asian country?

One thing for me has occasionally been the expectation of language skills. I learned no Chinese growing up and occasionally this is seen as a failure on my mother’s part. This however I suspect is not unique to being a hapa in China as I know this happens for many Asian Americans in Asia as well.

There seems to be this assumption that 混血兒 (mixed blood) people are smarter and better looking. I can’t really tell if this is just something that people say as flattery or if this is a widely held belief, though I am coming to suspect the latter.

My experience has mainly been one of a (white) foreigner in an Asian country and less so a hapa in an Asian country though. I guess unlike an actual white foreigner though, I do occasionally get mistaken for minority Chinese until I screw up in conversation and say something only a foreigner would say.

On second thought, being a hapa I find I get a lot of passes where somebody who was either fully Asian or fully something else would not. For every time I’m told the Chinese half of my family has failed to instill me with Chinese language and culture, I’ve no doubt there are many instances of it simply being chalked up to my non-Chinese half/upbringing.

In basically any situation I can choose to emphasize one half over the other as it suits me, which affords me a nice degree of flexibility and eases dodging any sort of ethnicity based assumptions that would work against me.

Edited after Owen’s answer: The above refers pretty much entirely to my experience in China. Elsewhere in Asia (India, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam) I am pretty much 100% white guy foreigner, probably in no small part as a consequence of spending my time in those countries as an obvious tourist.

Note June 8: updated here because I updated it there too.

Through hosting these movies, I’ve come to meet a whole bunch of new people in Beijing. It’s generally nice to meet new people in Beijing because over time I’ve come to notice that I lose friends pretty fast in this town. There’s no underlying drama or anything like that, only that it seems most people who I meet here are not long for Beijing, arriving and departing within the space of a year. If I’m lucky I’ll meet them early in that period and overlap with most of it. Mostly though I catch people in the middle and occasionally the end of their stays, their visits, their semesters, their job search.

So with the constant turn over in people there is a constant weakening if not breaking of those weak ties which I seem to have amassed so many of.

I wonder who I’ve known the longest here in Beijing. I guess there are a few people who I met very early on in my stay here, some even before I had even moved here, but who I don’t actually keep in touch with at all (for example, Ed I met at a dinner my parents hosted before I lived in Beijing. We never really spent much time hanging out or anything and at this point we’ll say hi when we run into one another but I feel like that’s happened less and less often as our mutual friends have drifted out of Beijing as well). But who is there who I actually keep up with regularly that I met here? I can think of maybe one or two people at most. Everybody else got here a lot later or already left.

I guess in a lot of ways that’s reflected in the notion that nearly three years is a long time to have been here to most people who hear it. There are of course the old timers, the old China hands who have been bouncing around Beijing for the better part of the last decade (my parents for example) but I don’t have all that much exposure to them. Mostly they seem to be a bit older than me, too, which has slowed my falling in with them socially.

I’m not really sure where I’m going with this, so I’ll cut myself short here and think on this some more.

The flight I took was on Ethiopian Airlines which runs a route from Beijing to Addis Abeba with a stop in Delhi. On the way back, I was seated next to a group of Chinese dudes from Tangshan.

When I first boarded the plane, I was pretty tired and fell asleep pretty much right away, as I am wont to do during air travel. Later though, when I was awake and eating some chewy chicken thing, the guy sitting next to me struck up a conversation.

In the past I’ve been really unreceptive to striking up random conversations with people because in Beijing the only people I ever encounter who try to strike up random conversation are people trying to sell me something, but during my visit to India I met a lot of people who were really just friendly and wanted to chat.

So anyway, I’m chatting with this guy and he’s trying to figure out what my deal is since I got on in Delhi, am flying to Beijing, and don’t really look that Chinese or Indian. I noticed that on this flight, in contrast with my flight out of China, it’s mostly Chinese (the flight out was much more Indians and Africans) and I asked what they were all doing in Addis Abeba.

He wasn’t sure about most of the people on the plane (and I’m not sure why I assumed he would have any idea) but him and his 3 buddies were all coming back to China from Zambia. Apparently they’d been traveling for something like 17 hours when I got on the plane in Delhi and were closing out 24 hours of continuous travel (final stop was Beijing where they all lived now).

I knew basically nothing about Tangshan and Zambia both (couldn’t locate either on a map either) so I asked these guys about what they were doing and where. First I got that Tangshan was in Hebei, so from this I guessed (correctly) that these guys were working in some heavy industry or mining or something and had been sent out to Zambia since China seems to have invested a lot in lots of African nations lately. That was exactly it, as they all had backgrounds in coal mining and had been sent to Zambia to investigate digging for something else (coal? oil? this got lost in translation a bit). They were coming back at that time because their Visas were up.

It was around this time that our conversation was getting to be too much for our mutual lack of each other’s language, so the guy next to me asked his buddy to switch seats him because the buddy’s English was better. I found out that this was their first ever trip out of China, and that Americans speaking English are much easier to understand than Africans and British and pretty much anybody else. It’s because all the TV and movies that these guys use to practice are American!

He lamented a bit how he wants to get better at English but he has nobody to practice with and not enough time outside of work to do so either. I sympathized though really for him it’s a lot more legitimate considering that I am a foreigner in China learning Chinese while he is not a Chinese dude in America learning English.

About this time the conversation turned as my conversations so often do to basketball. The buddy likes Garnett a lot, and the first guy said he likes the bulls, but also Kobe. The Bulls fan was apparently the best of the four of them, and wanted to know if I was very good at basketball because I am American (so obviously I play basketball all the time!). Compelled by my duty to truth I explained that I am not in fact much of a basketball player.

That’s pretty much all there was to it as by this time we were landing and we exchanged cards and pleasantries out at the luggage carousel and then I headed off.

1. the fattest corgi I have ever seen. It was walking (nay, waddling) along on the sidewalk and it was just so rotund.
2. A line of yelling (in unison), running, hairdressers. I think they were hairdressers at least, because they all had hairstyles that I have come to associate with people who work in hair salons here, and these guys were running around with their giant hair architecture bouncing along. I assume this was just another one of these weird morning exercises that businesses in China do together to foster team unity or something, but unlike the drills and jogs I see security officers doing when I get to work somtimes, it was a bunch of guys who looked like hairdressers.

These were within about a minute of each other and I kind of wished I was the kind of person who owned and carried around a camera so that I could offer amusing visual proof of these experiences.

That said, natto is definitely an acquired taste. When my chef sister first tried it she didn’t think it especially tasty, though allowed that it could have a place in fine Asian cuisine. Another friend of mine on taking her first bite declared that it was “like eating little solid bits of alcohol” (a description I didn’t really understand, though perhaps it was in reference to the somewhat ammoniac taste) along with a facial expression conveying very clear distate.

To what I assume is the typical western palate, natto is unpleasant at best (a funny read, but don’t take it too seriously, it’s not that disgusting). Just today I discovered “The Natto Project” an interesting account of some people who also decided to acquire a taste for natto, and their experience has proven interesting to me to read so far, though I’m only a couple days in at the time of writing.

In the rest of this post I’m going to recount my personal history of acquiring a taste for, as well as where in Beijing one can get, natto.

I think two years ago, maybe even less than that, I had never tried natto before. I had heard of it because it was one of those things that people told me smells bad but tastes good (like some cheeses, or stinky tofu [I like eating those too]). But I had never tried it before because I never even noticed it on a menu at any Japanese restaurants I’d been to up to that point, and having never seen it, didn’t really search for it when going shopping.

A friend of mine was living in Japan for a while and she told me a bit more about natto. I don’t remember anything specific, but she seemed to enjoy it well enough. Maybe she did from her first try? Maybe she too had acquired a taste over time, I don’t know. I think she told me it was supposed to be really healthy (“Natto: the ultimate health food“, it’s even got it’s own funny named enzyme “nattokinase“!), maybe she didn’t but that was the impression I got when I read about it online (mostly that one site and wikipedia probably). Whatever the case, I was curious.

I think about the time I moved to Beijing, I also became really curious about stinky tofu (chou dofu). The first stinky tofu that I can remember eating was at this place next to a market where I used to live in Beijing. Outside the shop stinks, though probably more due to its proximity to a public toilet than the stinky tofu itself. But I tried it, and was in love. That stuff was great. Theirs was pretty mild (I’m told) and the texture was just that of fried tofu, nothing particularly gross about it. I ate a lot of stinky tofu for a while after that and once or twice went and read a bit about it online as well.

After enjoying stinky tofu of a few varieties, and then hearing about some other fermented soy product that was also stinky and supposedly very good for you, I decided that I was going to be a person that likes pretty much whatever fermented soy food I could get my hands on. It occurred to me later that Miso also falls under this categorization, but doesn’t seem to be nearly so off-putting to most people on account of it’s lack of stinkiness. I’m not sure exactly why I was so determined about this, but I had been convinced that eating fermented foods was a really good idea because cultures that ate lots of fermented stuff were healthier or something like that. Eating lots of microbes that were alive and well in my food would give my immune system super powers. Or something. I also noticed that I really like the taste of a lot of things that are the products of fermentation: the sourdough culture I cultivated, kimchi, lots of booze, cheese, and so much more!

That was a long digression, but the essential point is that I decided to like natto, too.

Much time passed and I never really did anything about this because I continued to not notice natto anywhere.

But then one day in Texas of all places, I tried some natto. I was in Austin attending a friend’s wedding and in the days leading up to the big event we went to get lunch at this sushi place near where he lives. Not excellent, but considering our distance from, uh, oceans, not bad. While skimming their menu, I noticed that they had natto rolls, and I remembered my new goals. I ordered some.

It was gross. I don’t know if my memory of this is simply that it was my first time trying natto, I don’t know if it was actually gross Natto at the Japanese restaurant in Texas, I don’t know if it was something else. It was just natto and rice, wrapped up in seaweed, and I did not like it. I ate one, and what I remember thinking was that it tasted weirdly smoky, had a strange texture and that I didn’t want to eat anymore. I forced down the first roll, and later in the meal tried a second, thinking maybe it would be better. It wasn’t. I didn’t actually finish the roll and if you know me, you’ll know that I am not one who takes not finishing what is ordered lightly.

I didn’t give up though. A while later, long enough that I had forgotten the specifics of my first bad encounter with natto, I discovered natto as an appetizer on the menu of my favorite okonomiyaki restaurant in Beijing. I had to get it because maybe it would be better this time, different, palatable even. This time it came in a little bowl, a mound of natto, topped with some pieces of nori, chopped up spring onions, and a raw egg yolk. A bottle of soy sauce (also a fermented soy product!) was brought with it to the table. I wasn’t really sure how to eat this, so I poured in a bit of soy sauce and gave it a vigorous stir with my chopsticks.

This was my first experience with the sticky strands that are part of natto. They looked gross. I touched the sticky mass, and they felt gross. They also stuck to everything. Those strands stretch for a very long time, and they got all over me as I was sitting there playing with my food. I’m sure I looked very silly.

After enough of that though, it was time to give it a try. I worked a bite into my mouth, getting more strands on my face in the process. It was… weird. The texture was still taking some getting used to but this time it didn’t actually taste all that bad. I think having the egg and the soysauce and the onions all together really made a big difference for me because I finished that bowl without a problem.

And since then, I’ve come to really like natto, so much so that at some point I was thinking how I’d really like to have some, but didn’t know where to get it without going out to dinner at a Japanese place. I checked briefly when I went to by groceries a few times but never saw it anywhere, and for a while, I just assumed that it would be too difficult to find so why bother?

Then of course, my want to eat novel foods overtook my inertia and I started actually thinking of where I would get natto in Beijing. After a bit of google handiwork it seemed that my best bet would be to try a grocery store in a Japanese owned mall/building. The places that I found in searching for these were the grocery areas in Scitech plaza, SOGO, and Ito Yokado. I don’t actually know where the latter two are, but I do know where Scitech is (Jianguomen Wai) so I decided to swing by there after work one day.

Success! All sorts of Japanese foodstuffs can be found there, miso paste, natto, a bunch of other weird things I don’t know what they are, and so on.

I read that other places I could try are other big supermarkets such as Carrefour or Walmart and then browse their international foods, and that also the grocery area in Pacific Century Place (on Gongti Beilu) has a lot of Japanese stuff. I’ll have to check out these alternatives as some of them may be a bit more convenient for me. (Update: Sept 20 2009 – Pacific Century Place’s basement does indeed also have Natto, and moreover, there are more different brands there.)
(Update: Dec. 20 2009 – turns out the BHG marketplace supermarket right next to where I work has the cheap brand that I have taken to buying regularly. These supermarkets are all over the place in fancier malls and such! How did I miss this for so long?)

Now I’m curious what other tastes I may decide to try and acquire. Maybe the next thing to try and find is tempeh? I’m also slightly curious to improvise an incubator and make my own natto, but that’s a bit more involved of a project than I think I’m ready to taken on right now.

In retrospect, I should have said “fuck all you haters” and run it anyway because I don’t think it would have caused any major problems. At the time though, I was cowed into pulling back on my recruiting efforts which led into the second problem which was just not having enough enthusiastically interested people to get a game going.

This year I went after it strongly and it’s come together wonderfully. I had 60 people on board on the starting day and though a few had to drop out for assorted reasons, the game is going strong and so far (admittedly only 3 days in) so good.

That said, it is eating up a lot of my free time and screwing with my sleep schedule (all kills so far have been made after 11pm which for a early bird like me is a little tough), but I’m enjoying seeing the game unfold.

Updates are being made on a blog and on Twitter as @beijingassassin.